Check out http://billietweets.com. It plays the Billie Jean music video from YouTube on the left and on the right it's *sort of* closed captioned. It displays each word from the song as it's sung but it displays each word from a different new Tweet just posted.

You can do a lot of neat stuff with Twitter.

Last week the power apparently went off in my home while I was out because my clocks were all flashing the wrong time. No biggie. That kind of thing happens all the time, and the only consequence is that you have to reset all your clocks.

The next day I realized my PC wouldn't boot. After a whole lot of fiddling and faddling, I decided my motherboard must have gotten fried from a power surge even though it was under the watchful eye of a surge protector.

Since it's a few years old now, I went ahead and decided to upgrade to a new box, so I did a bit of research and bought all the equipment that was cheap, but should also keep me running at good speeds for years to come. This is the story of that computer. I'll probably tell it in a piecemeal fashion, starting with a simple list of all the pieces of my puzzle.

I'm keeping my old hard drives, optical drives, and floppy drive (just carrying it along because it's there), but everything else will be new equipment. I considered keeping the same case, but it was a Dell and custom built for just the hardware that was already in it.

So here's a rundown of all the new stuff:

... more inside ...

I've been listening to my local FM Talk station for many years... probably about 10 of them. After my decade of listenership, tomorrow will be the last day for all the staff of the entire station.

The shows I've grown to know and love listening to five days a week are going bye bye in order to flip the station's format (and all their FM Talk affiliates) to playing Top 40 music and compete with KIIS FM, which is Ryan Seacrest's flagship station for his morning show. They figured it'd be more profitable to just play music and cut into the Top 40 market than sustaining the huge paychecks for all their talk talent. C'est la vie.

Goodbye 97.1 KLSX. It was fun.

Just thought I'd announce a pretty interesting project that has just gone live.

Neatorama.com has a brand new, powerful feature called the Upcoming Queue. Neatorama does now and has always run on the WordPress blogging platform. Until now, only a handful of trusted authors/editors have been able to add neat blog posts to the Neatorama front page.

But in recent months, Alex, the site's creator and proprietor, had an itch to allow all of the site's members contribute their own blog posts to the site. So he approached Sift Partners about scratching that itch with Varo CMS, the software platform that powers VideoSift.

Over the course of a couple of months, a special version of Varo CMS has been painstakingly customized to work hand-in-hand with the existing WordPress blog. After all our efforts, the Upcoming Queue is now live for everyone to enjoy.

It will be of particular interest to any bloggers who want to garner a little attention for themselves because you are allowed to add posts that link back to your own blog. So if you have any neat blog posts you'd like to share at Neatorama, or if you just want to check out Varo CMS powering the new system, head on over to http://www.neatorama.com/upcoming and give it the old once over.

If you do give it a looksee, please let us know what you think.

[edit]
This just in: I just saw the announcement post and apparently the top submitter of February will win a free iPod Touch. Nice.

I was just thinking about all of our very long time members and that got me wondering... Is VideoSift part of your daily routine? I mean there are lots of sites out there that people check out from time to time and others you only go to when you're looking for something specific.

What is VideoSift to you? Is it your daily "I need to check out all the new videos" fix? How often do you visit on average? And when you do visit, how long do you stay?

Finally, how long have you been a member? More importantly how long do you foresee yourself continuing to be a member? There are a few oldies who, for various reasons, have up and quit in the past, but I can't imagine that I would ever have any reason to ever stop visiting VideoSift.

For me it's not just a fad or a phase, but a part of life. Even if I wasn't part of the administration, I imagine I'd always visit on a daily basis at the very least to watch great videos and at the most to partake in some random commentary. (No matter how busy I am with work and other things, I always have the itch to stop everything and take time out just so I can see what I've missed in the top 15.)

On the subject of statistics... Looking at Dag's "Visualizing 2000 Visitors an Hour" blog post I thought it would be interesting to throw together some graphs for various stats for the entire year of 2008. They are presented below in separate graphs keeping categories with similar values together for scale.

Included are: videos published, video down votes, video up votes, comments posted, comment up votes, comment down votes, comment spam votes, new users, banned users, Sift Talks posts, and blogs posted.

... more inside ...

If anyone is interested (and a legal adult) Porn Bumper could use a bit of help with some opinions and beta testing. Your insight and instincts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[edit]
To clarify, this project is not affiliated in any way with Sift Partners Inc., VideoSift, or The Great Dagicus. This is an independent project that happens to be affiliated with me, myself, and I alone, so the only mention you'll see of it on VideoSift is here in my personal blog.

Just giving Desktop Tower Defense another shot, this time trying in hard mode to capture a personal best. I came up a little short only achieving my 3rd best because I forgot to send in the next waves of creeps a couple times and let the flying bosses slip through my noose.

Doggone it.

Just ordered up some large prints of some pseudo oil painting versions of a few photos we snapped at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, BC, Canada from our trip back in September. They're pretty pretty so I thought I'd share. What do you think?

(Click through to see large versions of the images. They will open in a new window.)

... more inside ...

... more inside ...I've knocked Prince Zifnab back down below my high scores where he belongs. ... more inside ...

Just found this via Neatorama and had to share it. I love really old photos illustrating life that was, especially when it's of an interesting culture. This series of old postcards is definitely worth checking out if you're at all into history or geishas.

I haven't heard or read anything about it, but I just performed a google search and I was shocked to see three new little icons next to each search result.

One of them says "promote" which I guess adds to its credibility, another says "remove" which I guess flags a page as being no good, and the third says "comment" and when clicked pops open a text entry box for you to add a comment.

Anyone know anything about this business?

Whoa...

It took me a while but I watched all episodes of the excellent anime Death Note.

I just watched the live action part 1 DVD the other night and it was very well done. The next two days, Oct 15 and 16, 2008, there will be a special engagement of Death Note 2 (live action) in theaters at 7:30pm. I'll be watching it Thursday and I'm quite excited. Part 1 was quite a bit different than the anime and added a lot of intensity to an already very intense story.



Death Note is based on a book series and is the story of a boy named Light who finds a Death Note dropped into the world by a God of Death named Ryuk (because he was bored). Anyone whose name is written in the Death Note dies. Light goes on a rampage determined to cleanse the world of all evildoers. He's extremely intelligent, but there is also a genius investigator only known as L working to stop the unknown killer (known as Kira) who is murdering criminals on a worldwide scale. Light and L play a real world game of chess attempting with all their intellect and psychopathic people manipulation skills to deal the final check mate blow to the other.

If you have the time or are into anime I recommend the full series. Otherwise you should definitely check out the live action DVDs.

Finally got it after a couple months of waiting. So without further ado...



Voila!

Was in Vegas with a friend this weekend. Didn't do too much gambling, mostly saw a couple shows and watched a lot of anime on laptop. (Only true geeks would go to Vegas and spend half the trip in the room watching anime.)

My last hour in town I did my only real gambling. I laid down $100 at a roulette table. I followed a couple of ad-hoc strategies like splitting between two numbers across the board and selecting birthdays and anniversaries (which I hit on a few times).

After the dealer told everyone zeroes kept coming up at her previous break, I denied my instinct to bet on them, and of course they came up. After that I kept laying a stack across zero and double zero every spin. Finally 0 hit and my pile of chips was up to $165.

It was at this point I decided to place the most exciting bet of my life thus far. The entire time I was at the table red came up 3 times and black about a dozen, and every time I bet on red I lost. So to the dealer's dismay I enjoyed slowly pushing my entire enormous pile over to black. I wanted to vote red the whole time, but it just kept failing me.

It was a calculated risk and I had no delusions about any magical ability to entice black to come up. (Though I was stupid in thinking that there is some kind of a trend to consider. I reminded myself later: It's completely random, stupid!)

So as you can probably tell by now, that little ugly ball landed on red. I wasn't shocked, nor upset. I simply had a big smile on my face as I stood up and walked away knowing it was a great gambling experience to look back on. (At least I lost to red instead of a zero!)

Roulette's really fun. I can't wait to go back and play some more, but next time with Charms so I can really have some fun. (I missed her terribly. )